2 Tasting Notes

It’s an addiction, buying tea, is. I can quit any time! wild eyes
I have my prejudices and snobby opinions about the sort of tea you buy at the supermarket. The cheap mass produced teabags containing second grade tea at best. It’s very rare that I actually get some, but every once in a while I find myself in front of that shelf in the supermarket just to see if there’s anything new. A flavour or a combination there of that I haven’t seen before and I suppose it’s an okay way of checking if it’s worth trying it out at a better quality. I don’t know where in the world this brand is available, but it and Lipton are probably the biggest supermarket brands here in Denmark, and not one I’m usually all that impressed by but good enough in a tight spot. My main peeve with them is that if you read the brewing instructions on the box they insist on boiling water regardless of the type of tea. I don’t care what they say, I absolutely refuse to pour boiling water on green or white, the end.

Anyway, they had this sampler box of whites. And curiosity overwhelmed me. How much of a mess have they managed to make out of the delicate, valuable white tea? I figure if it’s awful, it’ll be good enough for the travel mug in the morning (and easier to prepare in a hurry) than my more expensive but better quality whites and greens.

It smells heavily perfumed and a lot like jasmine actually, which prompts me to see if there is a jasmine variety in the box. Guess what, there is.
Dear teabag producers. Jasmine scented tea is NOT a good choice to put in a sampler box, as it will turn everything in the box into a jasmine scented tea. -Me.
I can find the smell of grapes and pear, but it seems sort of synthetic.

I can pick up the pear in the flavour and it tastes natural. I can’t really find the grapes and the tea on which it was based does taste white, but also very bland and dull. I should like to know exactly which white tea this is supposed to be. It doesn’t help that these bags are not packed individually in an air tight way so it has picked up some of the jasmine from that other one in the box. I expect the variation with jasmine and orange blossoms will work a lot better than this one.

I have to say that it’s possible that I feel about pear the way I do about peach. I love the fruit, but I don’t much care for them in tea. Still, the tea as a whole totally lived up to my expectations.

ETA: I just added this tea and rated it 41, but on the tea’s profile it says 61. How does that work?

Yeah, at first I thought that every tea came with a standard rating of fifty, which would make sense so that no tea started out based only the first reviewer’s opinion, and then the rating adjusted with the average of the 50 + all the ratings given. But that could never be 61! O.o

@Angrboda the label on the tea page “Avg Rating” is misleading and we’re planning to change it…

Basically, the tea’s rating (as of now) is calculated using a weighted average (Bayesian, to be exact: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayesian_average ). The goal is that we don’t just account for individual ratings, but also the quantity of ratings for a particular tea. In short, each tea’s rating is a reflection of each of its ratings, taking into account how many ratings it has, and acknowledging the average number and value of ratings of all other teas on the site.

It can be a little confusing, but we hope it’s better than a plain average. We’re still monitoring and seeing how it works, so we may change it in the future. And, of course, we’re always open to suggestions!

Ah okay, so there’s a meaning to the madness. It threw me off for a bit there because at first glance it made it look like I wasn’t the first one to rate it. It was just something that I noticed with this one, probably because I gave it a below average rating, so it stood out more.

I like that it takes the number of individual ratings into account though, so a tea doesn’t get an unnaturally low rating because a small group of people didn’t like it.

Now I forgot what else it was I wanted to say. Means I should have another cup of tea, yes? Yes.